Yes, conversation is possible even with those persons, religious or otherwise, who believe that they have a monopoly on the truth.These conversations would be difficult, but the potential reward great.

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The importance of a constructive and candid dialogue between Islam and Christianity can hardly be over-stated. Such conversations are, and will always be freighted with history and burdened by the misunderstandings and confusions to which such a long troubled relationship gives rise.

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No. American is not a Christian nation. It has never been one. Nor should it ever become one.

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War is evil. War represents a failure of leadership. Nevertheless, as this is a far from perfect world, I believe that there are times when war can be justified.

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I believe that it is important that a candidate for president to demonstrate that he or she clearly understands and acknowledges the importance of religious freedom and the place of religion in the lives of many Americans.

I would hope that a candidate himself (or herself) is a person of faith in order that he may have sense of proportion about himself in the context of the enormous power that he will exercise should he be elected President of this great nation. Such an awareness should be an important component in his personal sense of ultimate accountability as he exercises the awesome powers that are reserved to that office.

However, I am not in the least convinced that it is helpful or edifying for presidential candidates to use specifically religious rhetoric in their campaign speeches. Personally, I find such rhetoric cloying: because of political necessity, it is either narrow and sectarian in its appeal or much more likely transparently superficial and self-serving. A further reason for my concern is that those statements of personal belief that are genuine (as I would hope they all would be) have embedded within them some specific religious tradition. This in turn can do little other than confer a certain sense of privilege of place to one particular religious community and suggest, if ever so subtly, a certain inferiority to all others. That, or so it seems to me, is contrary to the spirit, if not the letter of the law, of the separation of church and state.

Yes indeed, care for the environment should be a major priority for people of faith. For Christians there can be little choice.

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My answer to this question is in a word: NO.

I think that there are some violent people who profess the Muslim faith, but that does not mean that Islam is itself a violent religion any more than Christianity is a violent religion simply because violence has been perpetrated in its name.

Tempting as it may be, it is naïve to attempt to capture any great religious tradition in a few simple categories; such an approach inevitably leads not to simple statements but to simplistic ones.

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We should look for a president with wisdom, compassion, courage and integrity: the wisdom to know what he or she does and does not know; the compassion to recognize the integrity and worth of others, even when they disagree; the courage to listen to a wide range of points of view, without pandering to or dismissing them; and the integrity of character, having listened, to make clear and often difficult decisions. We need a president with the energy to stay focused on his or her enormous task, with the experience to understand the fundamental issues that face our great nation, and with the capacity to form and express a real vision of the direction we must take to address those issues effectively, both here at home and overseas. Finally, we need a president who can communicate that vision and those hopes not only to the people of this nation but to the larger world as well.

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American laws and American courts should treat the faith of Islam, and the sharia law to which it gives rise, with exactly the same respect—no more and no less—as they afford to the beliefs and practices of any of our many religious communities.

The freedom of religion which we enjoy in the United States is a basic right. It is not, however, an absolute right: the Constitution also gives rights to the states, as representative of the community, which may at times take precedence. Arranged marriages, for example, are legal in this country so long as both parties agree and both parties are of legal age. Or again, a Jehovah’s Witness may refuse medical treatment for himself or herself, but may not do so for a minor child. As in any situation where he or she is not prepared to accept a decision based on the law, an individual has the right to work to change that law, as well as the option to engage in civil disobedience – enduring the consequences that follow.

Those in this country who practice religion should, then, have the maximum freedom to follow their particular practices while at the same time living under the common constraints that govern all who live here. When a conflict arises between the interests of the state and those of a believer, the state must demonstrate (in court) why its interests (and thus those of the American people as a whole) should prevail; unless it can do this the Constitution clearly favors the freedom of the individual.

The archbishop’s statements have drawn a wide and heated response. Your question itself reaches a conclusion that his statement carefully avoided making: that sharia is “the body of Islamic religious law.” The archbishop’s lecture was long, dense, and certainly inadequately explicated. It left far too much to the hearer or reader’s imagination as to his actual intent. (For example, he spoke about “domestic issues”: it would have been helpful, given the widespread concern in western cultures about the rights of women under sharia, to know much more precisely what he meant by this). Further, it would seem that he went well beyond his avowed intention of “open(ing) up some of these wider matters,” as he proceeded to suggest the framework of an actual proposal to deal with the (admittedly always knotty) question of how best and most effectively to incorporate diverse communities into a pluralistic society.

But the assertion that some commentators have made that the archbishop simply proposed a separate legal system for the followers of Islam, without reference to, and apart from, the great and ancient tradition of English common law, is, intentionally or unintentionally, a distortion of what he actually said.